I just posted this to Glenn Reynolds at his MSNBC web log:

I would very much like to believe that Bush is serious about liberating the people of Iraq, but I cannot trust him. I don't believe George W. Bush means to liberate the Iraqi people. I believe he means to remove Saddam but keep the Baath party and its apparatus in place, including the secret police. He will betray the Iraqi people just as his father did, while taking credit for their supposed liberation. Why else would Turkey's consent be so important? They can't wait to invade the north and supress the Kurds. And how can we take Bush seriously as a liberator when he publicly speaks of using nuclear weapons against Iraq?

I am a democrat, not a republican, but if Bob Dole were president and said he wanted to liberate Iraq , I would be willing to believe him. In my eyes George W Bush is unprincipled and untrustworthy-- he only wants to go to war to distract people from our sour economy and our failure to capture Bin Laden.

they were the Greatest Generation, blah blah blah...

What is it with the History Channel? I just got back from the gym where the teevee was tuned to a documentary of sorts about the Normandy invasion entitled "Then and Now". They had the customary business of cutting between modern-day experts and stock footage of the events in question, only one of the experts sure looked like Dwight Eisenhower. I actually found myself wondering, briefly, if it was Eisenhower, even though the footage looked like modern industrial-video stock, and not color film from the 40s or 50s, which it would've had to have been as he didn't look that old. Later they talked to Rommel's son, then eventually to Montgomery's son, and eventually cut back to the Eisenhower look-alike who turned out to be-- yes, Eisenhower's son.
(Apparently he wrote a book about the war too.)
How many documentaries about D-day already existed before this one, I don't know, but there must be many. Why this particular reshuffling of stock footage, at this time? What is this, Pavlovian conditoning? Are we supposed to respond to this procession of WWII sons as a suggestion about how "righteous" George W. Bush is, readying to liberate Iraq, the wheeling and dealing with Turkey and the counsel of the house of Saud notwithstanding? How about a program about, say, the My Lai massacre in the coming weeks? Do you think we'll see it on the History Channel? I'm not even asking about a show on the US role in Mazar-e-Sharif...

I will say one thing though. It would be nice if we had a president who was as articulate in English as Manfred Rommel.

Bart:A Life of Her Own: Lana Turner and Ray Milland. She's a school of hard knocks gal who succeeds in the modeling racket but sacrificing a love life in return. Milland's a visiting married businessman who falls for her. They cheat. The wifie comes into play. Wifie's disabled, so Turner's unable to tell her the news, so she dumps Milland. After a talk with a lothario who tried to
woo her earlier, she realizes she'll be alone the rest of her life. A Cukor direction. Kinda of like those Ida Lupino vehicles,
though her characters are hard knock throughout.